NBA Live Gets Its First Patch, But Don’t Expect It To Change Much

NBA Live Gets Its First Patch, But Don’t Expect It To Change Much

NBA Live 14 showed a lot of problems at release a month ago — problems EA Sports vowed to fix through title updates. They rolled out the first patch for the game on Friday and, like everything else with this series for the past three years, it’s another promise this will be a good game at some future date.
“The most important piece that we’re adding is a change to our technology around our LiveUpdate system,” wrote Sean O’Brien, the game’s executive producer. “This is the first step in our plans for NBA Live 14. Many of the changes in this update are things you won’t actually see — technology additions that will pave the way for the additions to come. This will allow us to update and add content such as gameplay tuning, new animations, audio and visual assets directly to you as they become available.”

That’s not to say nothing was changed. “We’ve tuned shooting so that nailing the timing for a jump shot is a bit easier, as well as cutting down the number of blocked jumpers on the perimeter,” O’Brien said. And those were indeed huge problems in the game at release. Further, they’ve fixed the bug that caused the crowd to go completely silent in the “Big Moments” mode — where players attempt to re-create performances that happened recently in the league.

Those were the only two specific improvements to gameplay mentioned. There are many other issues to tackle in a fundamentally unpolished game. This update is apparently going to smooth the delivery of those fixes, again, sometime later.

“I’m sure you’re also looking for an update on some of the bigger projects we told you last month we’d deliver — improving the way the game teaches the controls and on-boards new users, and more visual improvements,” O’Brien wrote. If they’re patching in a full tutorial, well, better late than never, of course. Still it’s more ammo for those who decry publishers who put out busted games and finish their work while people are buying them — something nearly everyone in annual sports publishing is guilty of these days.

“Rest assured there is still more to come, and we’ll have more info to share in the coming weeks,” O’Brien said. Let’s hope they give people more than an IOU next time.

First NBA Live 14 Content Update Sets a Foundation for What’s to Come [EA Sports]

To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.


The Cheapest NBN 1000 Plans

Looking to bump up your internet connection and save a few bucks? Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Kotaku, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


2 responses to “NBA Live Gets Its First Patch, But Don’t Expect It To Change Much”